Introducing the Computer-Oriented Geoscience Lab
by Leonardo Uieda | 2019/08/19
In August 2019, I started a new position as Lecturer in Geophysics at the University of Liverpool. As part of this transition, I’ve had to think about my research in a broader context and analyse what sets it apart. Since the lab’s research will mainly focus on method development, the range of actual scientific applications that we could potentially work on is broad. Unfortunately, this makes coming up with a lab name rather difficult.
The constant thing throughout my career has been the fact that “computational thinking” is at the heart of everything I do: from potential-field inversion to forward modeling. After much brainstorming, “Computer-Oriented Geoscience” seems to accurately describe the type of research we do here: we apply computational methods to solve problems in geoscience.
As a direct consequence, we also develop and maintain several open-source projects that supports our research and implement the methods that we develop. Our language of choice is Python and we have years of expertise in modern and collaborative software development. We are a small group at the moment (only 2 members) but I’m hoping to grow with time.
This website serves as a portfolio of our research and also as a guide for members and collaborators. We are strong believers that the scientific process needs to be more open, collaborative, reproducible, and inclusive. As such, we have high expectations not only for the results of our work, but also for how it is done. Our lab manual provides detailed information, like our code of conduct and what collaborators can expect from us (and what we expect from them). The manual is based on the excellent Lab Carpentry blueprints.
We are eager to establish collaborations with applied scientists who have interesting problems that could benefit from our computational and numerical modeling skills. Get in touch if that sounds like you!